Art: Whos afraid of the big bad guy?

Is art vandal Banksy mellowing with age? His latest show  complete with rats  is really rather moral, says Waldemar Januszczak

I was feeling out of touch with contemporary art, as you do during art’s autumn feeding frenzy, when you bounce from one blockbuster to another. Since nothing is more important than contemporary art — it is art’s purpose, its conscience — the situation needed mending. The Turner Prize 2005 was out, though it opened last week, because that turned into an Establishment lie years ago. So I decided to hunt down the real groovy artists of right now. Of this week. What are they achieving? Who are they? To make it doable, I narrowed it down to a choice between a good guy and a bad guy, both of whom were being talked about by everyone. The bad guy is already a screamingly noisy presence in the media. There was an item about him on Channel 4 News the other night. Amusingly, though, nobody actually knows who he is. I’m talking, of